Congratulations, Barack Obama, on winning PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year”!

posted at 6:51 pm on December 12, 2013 by Allahpundit

As my pal Nathan said, this might be the first award he’s gotten that he truly deserved.

But give him time. A few more years of dithering until Iran has a nuclear weapon and he might earn that Nobel Peace Prize after all.

“If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” President Barack Obama said — many times — of his landmark new law.

But the promise was impossible to keep.

So this fall, as cancellation letters were going out to approximately 4 million Americans, the public realized Obama’s breezy assurances were wrong.

Boiling down the complicated health care law to a soundbite proved treacherous, even for its promoter-in-chief. Obama and his team made matters worse, suggesting they had been misunderstood all along. The stunning political uproar led to this: a rare presidential apology.

Him winning this was as much of a lock as an Adam Sandler movie being nominated for a Razzie. One question, though: Why is this the 2013 Lie of the Year instead of the 2009 Lie of the Year? That’s when he first started pushing the “if you like your plan” crapola, and that’s when conservative health-care wonks started calling B.S. on him for it. The final dimensions of ObamaCare weren’t settled at the time but the general scheme was clear enough — the sick would be covered and the poor would be subsidized with new revenue raised by forcing “young invincibles” to buy coverage and transitioning middle-class people to more expensive “comprehensive” plans. “If you like your plan, you can keep it” had to be a lie or else the law would have no chance of working.

And yet, as Sean Higgins noted last month, the hacks at PolitiFact backed Obama up on it in whole or in part no fewer than six times between 2008 and 2012. Last year, in the thick of the presidential campaign, O actually had the balls to say, “If you’re one of the more than 250 million Americans who already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.” That’s even more categorical than his infamous phrasing at the AMA conference in 2009. PolitiFact’s rating: Half-true. On the same day, they issued their verdict on a statement by Romney that 20 million Americans would lose their insurance under O-Care — a number that’s shaping up to be a gross underestimate once small businesses start grappling with the law. PolitiFact’s rating: False. Whether that was left-wing hackery or just myopic stupidity in focusing too closely on the precise phrasing rather than the overall framework of the law, you can judge for yourself. But Dan Foster’s right:

Skewering duplicitous administration, outmatched professional press, and vacuous “fact checkers” in a single tweet https://t.co/MzMRgHwgJ6

The fact that it took until 2013 for them to identify “if you like your plan” as a mammoth lie is proof that the media’s collectively either out of its depth in analyzing policy — even when scores of conservative policy experts were willing and able to help them identify problems with the law — or uninterested for political reasons in recognizing the law’s flaws until they’re so glaring that they can’t plausibly be ignored. This really is the Lie of the Year, and outfits like PolitiFact are entirely complicit in it.

Here’s the winner holding his prize, courtesy of Ted Cruz’s photoshop team. Exit quotation via Guy Benson: “‘Keep your doctor. Period’ has to be the early favorite for 2014 ‘lie of the year,’ right?”

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Why is this the 2013 Lie of the Year instead of the 2009 Lie of the Year? That’s when he first started pushing the “if you like your plan” crapola, and that’s when conservative health-care wonks started calling B.S. on him for it.

Because they were too busy calling the conservative health-care wonks “liars liars pants on fire”.

Obama has always been an easy, comfortable liar. In fact he seems to revel in lying, to come alive and shine, yet to seem at the time to be totally honest and sincere though. We can see this in the footage of him over and over saying “you can keep you plan / doctor / whatever.” It probably is pathological, but it’s a condition that up to this point (where he’s now suddenly paying the piper big-time) has served him well.

For four of the past five years, PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year has revolved around the health care law, which has been subject to more erroneous attacks than any other piece of legislation PolitiFact has fact-checked.

Really? How about b.s. attacks on the Bush tax cuts? It’s been going on for a decade.

If there is a lie of the year then each year since Obama became President he should win the lie of the year… In fact if they are going to list the top one thousand lie of the year Obama should win them all and for the last 5 years if not before… The man cannot simply speak the truth no matter how simple it is…

Plus, where were the media on all this, since 2009…ah, in his azz. It ain’t Beluga caviar, morons. May you all suffocate in there, with NO exceptions. All who brung/kept him and obama’care’, go directly to Hell.

When you’re a leftist and you’ve lost Imus, that’s saying something. But when you’re a black leftist and you’ve lost Imus (after his constant attempts to redeem himself from the “nappy headed whore” comments that had gotten him fired), you’re in deep shit trouble.

Great expose…thanks for pointing out that POLITIFACT hasn’t had the most credible reporting over the past few years, especially when it comes to Obamacare. They’re a little late to the “OMG you mean I can’t keep the coverage the president promised I could keep…period” party. It took millions of people actually losing their policies before their little pants on fire icon went up. Too late, If you want to expose something as a fact or not, the time to do it is when the statements are being made, not after it’s been exposed as a lie by national media.

If BUSH has made the if you like it you can keep it statement, the media would have been investigating from the beginning and the whole program would have unraveled by now. So POLITIFACT is part of the problem, not the solution.

Like most sociopaths (notably Bill and Hillary Clinton), The One lies even when it would be to his benefit to tell the truth, just to see if he can get away with it. It gives him a thrill to think he’s outsmarting all those stupid people he is more brilliant than.

I had first-hand experience with this growing up; two aunts. As my mother said of same, “If _____ or _____ tells you the sun’s up, look outside to make sure- odds are, it’ll be down“. She had the Clintons pegged from the start.

The One also lies because being an egotistical narcissist, he cannot conceive of himself as being anything less than perfect. If anything goes wrong, it must be someone else’s fault. As such, if he can’t find a convenient (or at least believable) scapegoat… out comes a lie.

Finally, many of his prevarications are the result of him living in a fantasy world inside his head. I’m sure O-care works perfectly in there.

PolitiFact’s rating: False. Whether that was left-wing hackery or just myopic stupidity in focusing too closely on the precise phrasing rather than the overall framework of the law, you can judge for yourself.

So this fall, as cancellation letters were going out to approximately 4 million Americans, the public realized Obama’s breezy assurances were wrong.

I wish writers were more precise in their descriptions. Obama’s “breezy” assurances were anything but breezy. They were in fact, emphatic! Which makes O’s lies even more egregious to my way of thinking.

Just wait until the avalanche of hate starts pouring into Politifact’s office from leftist blogs, MSNBC and the rest of the MSM. They’ll backtrack on this faster than a RINO making a campaign promise to cut taxes.

The backtracking and spin has already begun in earnest to get as far ahead of the pain he’s bringing as possible. The new lie is he and the rest of the libs really believed the grandfather clause would work but congress insisted on adding all those new and wonderful coverages to everyone’s policies. He really believed the law would work to give everyone better health care much as Bush believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Guess they can’t go too far without blaming Bush for something.